Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

by N.T. Wright

I have argued in detail elsewhere that the only possible explanation for the rise of Christianity and for its taking the shape it did was that Jesus of Nazareth, three days after being very thoroughly dead (Roman executioners were professional killers and didn’t let would-be rebel leaders slip out of their clutches), was found by his followers to be very thoroughly and very bodily alive again. His tomb was empty; had it not been, his followers would have believed they were seeing some kind of an apparition. Such things were well known in the ancient world, as in fact they are today. Equally, they really did see, touch, and share food with Jesus as a real, bodily presence; had they not, they would have concluded that an empty tomb meant that the grave had been robbed. Such things were better known in the ancient world than they are today. The combination of empty tomb and definite, solid appearances is far and away the best explanation for everything that happened subsequently.

Yes, they did, and we have to take those stories seriously too. They don’t correspond to what first-century Jews, the majority of whom believed in eventual resurrection, would have thought “the resurrection” would be like.

What we are witnessing in the resurrection stories—which, obviously, are quite unlike any other stories before or since and therefore invite the skepticism they have received as much in the ancient as in the modern world—is the birth of new creation. The power that has tyrannized the old creation has been broken, defeated, overthrown. God’s kingdom is now launched, and launched in power and glory, on earth as in heaven. This is what Jesus said would happen within the lifetime of his hearers.

Jesus’s risen person—body, mind, heart, and soul—is the prototype of the new creation.

There is a love, a deep, moving warmth that goes out from Jesus. But this love is strong, powerful, life-changing, life-directing. New creation has begun; and its motivating power is love.

Most Christians in today’s world have not even begun to think how calling Jesus “Lord” might affect the real world.

But now, with Jesus joining heaven and earth together in his own person, the Holy Spirit, which anointed and equipped Jesus himself for his kingdom work, comes pouring out onto his followers, so that they become as it were an extension of that new Temple. Where they are, heaven and earth are joined together. Jesus is with them, his life is at work in and through them, and, whether in Jerusalem or out in the wider world, they are the place where the living God, the God who is reclaiming the world for his own, is alive and active and establishing his sovereign rule.

worshipping the God we see at work in Jesus is the most politically charged act we can ever perform. Christian worship declares that Jesus is Lord and that therefore, by strong implication, nobody else is.

Worshipping the God we see in Jesus orients our whole being, our imagination, our will, our hopes, and our fears away from the world where Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite (violence, money, and sex) make absolute demands and punish anyone who resists. It orients us instead to a world in which love is stronger than death, the poor are promised the kingdom, and chastity (whether married or single) reflects the holiness and faithfulness of God himself.